How to Build Resilience in a Changing World
Exploring a journey from the city to the farm - Part 3
Hello dear reader, it has been a minute since the last post. I got caught up juggling LIFE… I was editing a new short film called ‘Turning an Abandoned Farm into a Garden of Eden’ and prepping for a TEDx talk - it should be out next week. Today is an easter holiday here in Spain. I’m at my desk at home. I’ve put on my favourite playlist and lit some incense. I’m in the zone… and ready to continue. Let’s dive in!
Shifting from Lines to Circles
I want to plant the seed of two ideas that helped me shift from feeling overwhelmed and pessimistic about the future to feeling a new sense of hope and optimism for what comes next. I’m going to communicate these ideas with two simple diagrams. As a visual person, I find these kinds of tools really useful. I’ll weave my personal story around the diagrams, so I hope this post doesn’t feel too technical. I think both of these ideas are profound if you really sit with them.
We’re picking up the story in London in early 2020. After a mind-bending trip to Brazil and Peru, I was ready for a change and full of inspiration. I returned with this new sense of awe for Nature and a curiosity for how we find our way back to connection. As the COVID-19 pandemic swept from China towards Europe, like everyone else, I sheltered at home. To pass the time, a friend sent me a link to an online course called Think Resilience by the author Richard Heinberg. With little else to do, I signed up. At the time, I didn’t realise how formative that course would be. Looking back… it changed everything. One concept in particular that really stuck out was The Adaptive Cycle.
This is a diagram by the Canadian ecologist C.S. Holling, who spent his career studying ecosystems and how they adapt to change over time. It shows a closed loop, four-stage process that illustrates (in a simple way) how systems navigate change over time; this idea can also be applied to social structures such as human civilisations.
To understand it, let’s start at the top right. This is where a transition begins in a phase known as ‘Conservation’. As a visual metaphor, imagine a mature Ponderosa Pine forest - just doing its thing. Eventually, a disruption comes along, such as a forest fire, throwing the entire system into chaos, and the next phase begins - ‘Release’, also known as ‘Collapse’. This feels very much like where our civilisation is today, as our climate becomes ever more unstable with entire ecosystems disappearing around us. For me, before seeing this diagram, I thought of our future trajectory as a line with an apocalyptic ending… therefore, the future seemed pretty bleak… but Holling suggests you need a disruption to create the opportunity for the next phase of the cycle: ‘Reorganisation’. This is where systemic change can really happen.
In the phase of ‘Reorganisation’, the system must adapt itself to the new conditions around it. This is where the opportunity for a redesign has the most potential. In the example of the Ponderosa Pine forest, below the blackened silhouettes of burnt tree trunks, new networks and relationships are forming within the soil. The seeds of the pinecones that popped off like grenades during the fire start to crack open, rooting themselves into the fertile ground below. The cycle of the forest begins again, going into the next phase, ‘Growth’. As the new system establishes itself, it begins to grow, marking the end of the transition. A new resilient forest has been born, and life blooms with it. Eventually, decades into the future, the growth slows down as the forest moves back into ‘Conservation’, and so the next transition is ready to begin. And so on. This is not an exception but the rule. This is how ecosystems have navigated change throughout time. This is what resilience looks like.
For me, this diagram changed everything. As a designer, I understood that in order to reimagine the world around us, we must first embrace the phase of collapse and release. In fact, this is where the opportunity for innovation is at its greatest! So while I am painfully aware of everything that is being lost around us today, I have shifted most of my focus and energy onto the next phase to come: How do we reorganise? And what would it look like to redesign?
Moving from Degeneration to Regeneration
As these questions started firing around my brain, I began reading more and more about regenerative design. This practice draws on Indigenous wisdom. It works with natural living systems to support conditions conducive to life. One of the best examples today is regenerative agriculture, an approach to growing food that focuses on feeding the soil and supporting the biodiversity around it. However, regeneration goes beyond just farming. New practices are emerging right now in how we design cities, businesses, economies, and communities.
As the pandemic continued to take its toll and restrictions became ever greater, I buried myself in books, reading ‘Designing Regenerative Cultures’ by Daniel Christian Wahl and ‘Regenerative Development and Design’ by Pamela Mang and Ben Haggard. The more I learnt, the more excited I became. This led me to another diagram that answered my question of what the phase of ‘reorganisation’ might look like.
Ths the Trajectory of Ecological Design by Bill Reed. It shows a spectrum starting with a ‘Conventional’ approach to design. This is broadly where we are today. We currently shape the world around us in a way that is degenerating the health of the planet. If you want to go deeper into this, check out the Planetary Boundaries Framework by Rockstrom and his team. However, before we get too depressed, the good news is there’s an entire spectrum towards regeneration! Sustainability, which seems to be our current North Star, sits somewhere in the middle. Not harming… but not doing much good either. Surely our collective goal as a sentient, conscious species should be to work towards regeneration, where we are actively participating in creating thriving living systems.
This felt like a lightbulb moment for me. So, in the middle of the pandemic, encouraged by the same friend who originally sent me the course on resilience, I decided to quit the architecture degree I was doing at the Architectural Association in London and apply instead to a unique two-year research degree at the University of Cambridge. This course allowed students to study an area of their choice within the field of architecture, culminating in a 14,000-word thesis and a design project. I was determined to focus on the field of regenerative design and find out what it looked like in practice.
Embracing Food, Farming & Community
Over those two years, I went deep. I read every book I could get my hands on, including a particularly seminal book called ‘Regenerative Design for Sustainable Development’ written back in 1994 by John T Lyle. I travelled again to Peru to learn more about indigenous wisdom and to Spain to take a course at the Regeneration Academy. I found that there are plenty of examples where human cultures have evolved to support regeneration. This isn’t a new idea. It is more something we forgot… A skill that has been lost in the rush to industrialise, modernise and accommodate an explosion of new humans on the planet.
Through this research, I became increasingly interested in food systems. Agriculture is both the leading cause of the environmental problems we face today. Yet at the same time, it has the greatest potential to solve them - if practised through the lens of regeneration. I read about permaculture, biodynamics, agroforestry and food sovereignty. I ended up focusing my work and my research on Ibiza, a little island in the Mediterranean where I had grown up every summer as a kid. Ibiza is a great example of a place that has seen a collapse in its agricultural economy. An island once almost entirely self-sufficient now imports up to 96% of the food it consumes. It’s ripe for a redesign!
So that’s where we pick up in the final instalment of this series. I’m going to explain how my student thesis became a very live project called Juntos Farm. It has been nearly three years since I graduated, and I am now working alongside 35 incredibly talented people to create a regenerative farm and community food hub in the heart of the island. We are putting regenerative design into practice every day, and we are not alone. There is a growing movement worldwide, working towards the design of healthy, living systems and laying the foundations for the reorganisation to come.
Stay tuned for the next one!
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Finn